Can you explain what you mean by "apples to apples"? You're not the first to mention it. I honestly have never run a benchmark before and did it on the code that was in the passage only to test the statement the author made about the comparative efficiency.
I was thinking that if both pieces of code did the exact same thing and I benchmarked them I could figure out if speed was being sacrificed by the use of the more brief coding technique. BrowserUk explained that the speed on this particular operation was trivial, but the sacrifice could potentially be in memory if we were to apply this procedure on a larger scale. So I thought I had my answer. Am I approaching this problem in the wrong way? In this case what are my apples and oranges and how would I go about doing a proper benchmark? I apologize if I'm asking too many questions.